Traumatic Spatiality: From Kawabata Yasunari to Taiwanese Postmodernity (II/II)
Date Issued
2002-07-31
Date
2002-07-31
Author(s)
DOI
902411H002033
Abstract
In recent decades, cultural theories have focussed
attention on the emergence of a disruption in human
history and a transition to a new future. Accounts of
postmodernity, postcoloniality, cyberculture, the
posthuman, etc., all point to the breaking of a new
dawn in history. In discussions on globalization,
however, a somewhat different imagining of time has
taken shape. In this respect Hardt and Negri’s
Empire has been ground breaking by proposing that
socio-political globalization have been ordered by
rules which are not extensions of imperialism but
hark back, almost atavistically, to an earlier mode of
imperium.
Hardt and Negri also envisions the coming of a
new epoch, but their account defies theoretical
trendiness by returning an endlessly accelerating
postmodernity to a dimension of grand history,
effectively refuting Virilio’s thesis that “extensive”
time is being replace by “intensive” time. This
reversed, secondary upscaling amounts to the
reflexivizing of time (difference within difference,
speeding up of speeding up).
Reflexivity, in recent re-theorizing of
postmodernity as second modernity, pertains to the
reflexive turn, the radicalizing of modernity. This
bring out a modernity which is rich with alternative
possibilities. The drive of modernity to shift into its
reflexive phase is not subject to human will (hence
the alterity of “risk society”), which points to a
exterior source of order, reversing the anti-systemic
tendencies emphasized by earlier accounts of
postmodernity and heralding the emergence of a new
“extensive” cultural dynamic.
Examples of fiction from Taiwan (a place highly
sensitive to globalizing trends) show that this
externalized cultural dynamic, highlighted by the
culture of “empire,” may combine with the drive
towards the leveling of distinctions, another
significant effect of postmodernity, to form highly
complex cultural reciprocities.
Subjects
postmodernity
second modernity
reflexive modernity globalization
empire
Publisher
臺北市：國立臺灣大學外國語文學系暨研究所
Type
report
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